Simple Arabic Fonts

[Hildegard Lobach]

Idid some testing, I disabled Geeza pro in Font Book, and automatically OS X made the next available Arabic font the default one. I disable that too and the next available one became the default one, and the fonts were listed alphabetically.

OK, so if I can somehow change the name of Tahoma to some something like AAArabicTahoma so that it becomes the first font that supports arabic I can disable Geeza Pro, and OS X will automatically start using this font.

Tahoma cannot in general be used for Arabic on a Mac, because it uses Windows opentype technology to connect the letters. I think only TextEdit and perhaps Mellel will display it properly. Other apps will not show the different shapes of Arabic characters in medial and final position. That requires the Mac aat technology you find in Geeza Pro and some other fonts.

Thanks Tom, I tested Tahoma in WriteRoom and you are right Tahoma is not recognized, only TextEdit seems to recognize this font. Another font that I like is Arial Unicode MS which works in WriteRoom and I just tested it by disabling Geeza and all the other Arabic fonts above it Arial unicode, and OS X is using it as the default font in Twitter, Stickies, spotlight, chrome, etc. which means its supported by Mac.

So, now I will just have to rename Arial Unicode MS into something like AAArial and that would do the trick. I checked out FontForge but its only offered as source and I am not really that experienced at compiling. FontLab, they probably have some Trial and since I only need to use it once I met get away with that, but which product is it?

Arial Unicode is the same technology as Tahoma and will not work in most apps. If you think it is working in WriteRoom it has simply substituted Geeza Pro or another Apple font instead. If you will make the text size very large you should be able to see that it is not Arial Unicode.

Ya its a simple job to change the font everytime I want to type in Arabic, but this is something that I will be doing every single time on each and every app that I use, so if there is a solution to change the default font, why not use it. And for some apps like Twitter or Chrome, I dont have the option to change the font, hence my only option is to change the default font.

By the way, I think I was wrong, I did not have my OS 7 machine running, but it looks like for me both Tahoma and Arial Unicode now display with connected letters in WriteRoom (though I would still recommend choosing an Apple font).

I was able to achieve what I wanted. A friend of mine had Fontlab studio, and I was able to Modify the Tahoma and Tahoma Bold fonts into AAATahoma and AAATahoma Bold. I had to rename the PostScript name, full name, family and a bunch of other names and now OS X recognises it as a totally different font and there is no conflict with the original Tahoma and Tahoma Bold fonts. I named the files to AAATahoma so that they become the first fonts that support Arabic, like I said earlier OS X resolves to the first font that supports Arabic when Geeza Pro is disabled, and it does that alphabetically.

I have tested it and I haven't had any issues, it works with Safari, Mail, Textedit Wordpress, chrome, twitter, Growl, Spotlight Finder, Dashboard, pretty much every app that I have tried so far.

I don't know if it is legal to modify the name of the fonts, but other than the name I haven't modified anything else, like the copyright information, the owner deisgner etc. and I am only using it for personal use.

Thanks for that info, you have found a trick that can be quite useful for people who want to do that in 10.7. I suspect the main apps which will still not work with Tahoma are Pages and the others in the iWork suite -- will have to test them.

As you know I was able to change the default font and everything has been working fine, however I have noticed that with the Twitter app, whenever there are lots of Arabic tweets to load, the fontd process in activity monitor jumps to 98% CPU for a few seconds and then goes down to 0%, it has also become a bit unresponsice and I am seeing the spinning ball of death more often. I am also using Yorufukurou, another twitter app and haven't had an issue with it either, seems like its only a problem with the way the official Twitter app works. When I reverted back to Geeza Pro as my default font, Twitter app became resposive again.

Currently the code is conditionally compiled for a particular module.

I'm wondering if at some point users may want to mix devices at the same time?

Some libraries already allow configuring the orientation on each individual matrix/7219.

additional note:

The per library object would be nice for when different projects use different

versions of the h/w. Today, even if you don't mix/match h/w types on a project

you would have to edit the library header each time you switched between projects

that use different h/w.

Having the ability to specify the h/w type at the object level would at least

allow the sketch to specify the h/w vs the ifdefs in the library.

First i would like to introduce my self , i start by saying i'm not young any more , been in love with electronics since i was 16 , graduated a technical high school at the breaking of the 80's major in electric, but always liked building simple electronic circuits from books or magazines.

one of my big projects was building a large scale public size 4 digit led clock with temperature and 24hr format ,( i'm bringing the clock back to modern age with Arduino (i hope ) in a different thread), at that time didn't know Micro Controllers ,at late 80's i learned Basic when was the total PC speed 32 or 64 megs with a bulky external 51/4 floppy drive.

late 90's i got interested in Microchip PIC's and bought a few books and learned to write assembly programs but i never mastered the instructions.

then lost interest because of time consuming process involving the PCB cad design , etching , drilling and learning programming which i had no time for all of that, as i have projects of other interests.

All this time and i was always interested in moving text on dot matrix displays ,

then one day a relative of mine in the elevator development industry mentioned something about Arduino Concept and i got interested right the way , couldn't believe the amount of project and software are available on the web and i would like to take the opportunity to thank all individuals made the Arduino hardware and software available to everyone.

so basically i'm more of a hardware guy , but C++ i'm in first grade day one.

Now @ Marco first you did a wonderful job here and i want to thank you,

i did some experimenting with the Parola Lib (by the way i downloaded the latest release) on a 8 Dot matrix modals the SMD type and i managed to switch the hardware selection in the MD_ MAX72xx.hex to make them work as i see there are 3 different type of setups.

OK i did go through all the thread and documents attached to the Parola but because me not knowing the C++ i couldn't figure it out.

some of the examples compile OK but others give errors and i'm attaching an image for the Parola FONT example, also i want to bring an old /new reply for one of the persons you helped on this thread which also internist me and i would like to contribute to the Parola if i can , which is the Arabic Font ,

i did a font bit map editing on a Arabic font utility and found a lot of mistakes on the drawing of the character on the 8x8 DOT Matrix.

but the problem that i have is displaying the font on the matrix , i did follow all the comments in the thread , (i know that you made the font as a selection in the software but i couldn't figure out the routine .

so lets start step by step first can you explain the errors or how to fix them so i can get the sketch compiled and then we will talk about the Arabic font .

Parola_Zone_TimeMsg make few errors but the first one is " /dht11' doesn't name a type" i don't know if its related to the Parola error or not but i saw that its #including Parola_Fonts_Data.h in the program.

and by the way i have the MD_DS1307 lib, but i didn't install the time modal hardware.

I did some work on the Arabic Font , i noticed that your using 5x7 is that a preference or it makes things easier than 8x8,

anyway check the image that i attached the Arduino in Arabic looks much better than the one that was chopped up i think i have to edit all the characters in the Font set but something have to be done first, the blank column between the letters have to be removed and then i will adjust the letters to have the space in the font frame look at the left 3 letters you will see what i mean. may be you can do some routine that will remove the blank column only when using Arabic Font ..just an idea.!

The inter character spacing can be adjusted by the method setChararacterSpacing(). It is fully under calling program control and is documented in the library html docs. 5x7 is not a limit and there are many characters defined that are bigger than this. The font builder can handle much bigger matrices.

Hi , the reason i asked about the 5x7 Font , because the Arabic fonts in Font_data file , if its not within the 5x7 frame it will not show up the right way on the matrix and they will be wiping them self's out.

i'l be happy if i can accomplish a hex print call for the Arabic Fonts and not necessary to have the complex scripts of which character joins another according to position in the word .by other words just like you used the different language prints in the Parola Font Example. "\x0bc\x0b6\x0bd\x0e6\x090\x092\x088", but on the same time have the words look right on the Matrix.

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